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Review of Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography

What should you include? What should you omit? And how do you
represent what you've found? These are among the many challenges a
biographer faces. In Isadora Duncan: A Graphic
Biography, Sabrina Jones has the additional challenge of
deciding how to depict the subject's life graphically. Cleverly,
Jones foregrounds these problems in her introduction, and then uses
them to her advantage in her account of the innovative dancer. The
result is an engaging chronicle of Duncan's life that is both
fast-paced and appropriately reflective about the biographer's art.

Isadora Duncan finds many ways to make virtues of the difficulties in constructing a life narrative. Grappling with contradictory accounts, Jones draws back-to-back versions of herself, each reading a different version of Duncan's life: on the left, holding the autobiography My Life, Jones reads of Duncan dancing for the rich and giving to the poor. She thinks, "You go, girl!" On the right, she reads a biography, and exclaims, "She lied!" (5). As Jones notes, Duncan "was as proud to dance for the Romanovs as she was for Lenin" (6). The book plays out Jones' Janus-faced response, exploring Duncan's progressive impulses alongside her regressive ones, the dancer's sympathy for the downtrodden rubbing up against her sense of her own self-importance. The friction between Duncan's many selves makes for entertaining reading, but also reminds us that a biography is a construction. No one portrait is definitive.

The absence of any movies of her movements underscores the trickiness
in assessing Duncan's art. Noting that "There is no film of her
dancing" (7), the book derives its illustrations from still
photos, and explicitly references some of them on one of the
full-page portraits of Duncan: "Abraham Walkowitz made thousands of
images of her dancing. Many were used to research this book" (57).
More subtly calling attention to the book's reliance on photos, Jones
sometimes depicts Duncan's face in the style of early
twentieth-century photographic portraiture, presumably basing these
renderings on existing photographs.

The recurring full-page images of Duncan (roughly a half-dozen in all)
are apt for her larger-than-life personality, suggesting that she
literally cannot be contained by the panels or the page. Jones'
energetic, fluid line animates Duncan's movements, placing her body at
the center of the tale. In an early such page, Jones shows the dancer
at two moments simultaneously, giving a vivid sense of the body in
motion. In the lower half of the page, her left leg launches her in
one direction, as her right pivots her another. In the upper half of
the page, her torso and arms move back towards the left side of the
page – gracefully and impossibly twisting her body. Her size
and vigor visually diminishes the power of the four men who appear in
the three panels she traverses. The first three, all Lilliputians to
her Gulliver, are: an American reporter who quips, "She looked pink,
talked red, acted scarlet"; evangelist Billy Sunday, denouncing her at
the pulpit as "that Bolshevik hussy"; and a Methodist minister calling
her "a jumping Jezebel" (8). These tiny men's opinions, Jones
suggests, are insignificant to Duncan. Though we only see the head of
future spouse Gordon Craig, the theatre designer's noggin is
represented in the same proportion as Duncan's, suggesting that she
will value his ideas more... which, unfortunately, she does. (The
love of her life, Craig proves both unfaithful and overbearing.)

Though such images do convey Duncan's considerable inner strength,
Jones also displays how Duncan's adventurous life would take its toll.
Succinctly displaying the range and emotional burden of Isadora
Duncan's obligations, Jones draws her in the position of Atlas bearing
the weight of the world (44). Perspiring, Duncan supports a
globe-shaped panel page depicting her irate family ("all of whom lived
entirely on Isadora's income"), her dancing school, her household
staff, her touring musicians, and her philandering lover (then Gordon
Craig).

One challenge not faced by a biographer of Duncan is narrative
interest: In 125 pages, fifty years of Duncan's life whiz by. Duncan
has children and loses them; she oscillates between just scraping by
and living in luxury; she performs all over the world; she marries,
has affairs, causes a sensation with her dancing. (Indeed, some 80
years before Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," Duncan had a
similar one: then as now, guardians of morality thought an exposed
breast a grave danger to the public.) If there is a criticism to be
made here, it is that the pace of the narrative and the importance of
Duncan's very public personae do limit our views of her equally
important interior life. However, to her great credit, Jones resists
making Isadora Duncan the graphic-novel version of the
sensational bio-pic. She depicts Duncan with sensitivity, allowing us
to glimpse at least some of the complex character behind the public
figure. And she does it all with grace, verve, and humor
– the very same qualities that make Duncan such a fascinating
subject.

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